As a child,
you tend to take your position in life for granted, as written
into the natural order of things. You were born, say, into a white
middle-class family, you are comfortably off, in good health and
not in any particular distress. You have rights and privileges,
and these are generally respected. You aren't hungry or imprisoned
or enslaved. You go on nice holidays. At an early age, you
probably assume everyone lives like this. It seems natural that
you enjoy the kind of life providence has granted you. You don't
think about it.

Then you
start to notice that others are less fortunate (and some others
more fortunate). You see people around you who are poorer than
you, possibly homeless, or who have something serious mentally or
physically wrong with them. You start hearing about people in
foreign countries who are starving to death, or being blown up in
wars, or suffering from terrible diseases. Some of them are
children like you! These facts jar on you; and they force you to
make comparisons with your own life. Soon you are struck with a
certain terrifying thought: that it is really just luck
that you are not in their shoes. You happen to have been born into
a certain class, in a certain part of the world, with certain
social arrangements, at a certain period in history. But there is
nothing necessary about this — it is just the luck of the draw.
Things could have been different in ways that don't bear thinking
about. You ask yourself what your life would have been like if you
had drawn the short straw and lived in less felicitous
circumstances. You imagine yourself born into a land of famine, or
arriving on the scene before medicine made any progress with
plagues, or before modern plumbing. You thus entertain a kind of
philosophical thought: that it is just contingent that
things are as they are, and that you could have been very much
worse off. You are just lucky. Equivalently, you see that it is
just bad luck for the others that their lives are as hard as they
are. There is no divine necessity or inner logic about any of
this. It is basically a moral accident. There but for fortune . .
.

And with this
thought social conscience begins. Since there is no deep necessity
about the ordering of well-being among people, we should try to
rectify (avoidable) inequalities and misfortunes. The
arbitrariness should be removed from the distribution of
well-being. We should discover the sources of misery and
deprivation and try, where possible, to erase them. We should
certainly not voluntarily contribute to the disadvantaged position
of others. We should not exploit the power that is ours by sheer
cosmic luck. Thus, morality is founded in a sense of the
contingency of the world, and it is powered by the ability to
envisage alternatives. Imagination is central to its operations.
The morally complacent person is the person who cannot conceive
how things could have been different; he or she fails to
appreciate the role of luck - itself a concept that relies on
imagining alternatives. There is no point in seeking change if
this is the way things have to be. Morality is thus based
on modality: that is, on a mastery of the concepts of necessity
and possibility. To be able to think morally is to be able to
think modally. Specifically, it depends upon seeing other
possibilities - not taking the actual as the necessary.

I think, to
come to the present point, that human adults persistently
underestimate the role of biological luck in assuring our dominion
over the rest of nature. We are still like children who take the
contingent facts to be necessary, and thus fail to understand the
moral significance of what actually goes on. People really do
believe, in their bones, that there is a divine necessity
underwriting our power over other species, so they fail to
question this exercise of power. Indeed, this assumption is
explicitly written into many religions. In every possible world we
are at the top of the biological tree. As children, we naively
took our family position to be the locus of cosmic necessity; now
we assume that our species position is cosmically guaranteed. We
assume, that is, that our relation to other species is basically
the way things had to be, so that there is no point in
questioning the ethics of that relation. Hence social conscience
stops at the boundary of the human species, give or take a bit of
supererogation here and there. We don't take seriously the idea
that it is just luck that our species is number one in the
biological power hierarchy. So our conscience about our conduct in
the biological world isn't pricked by the reflection that we
might have been lower down in the scale of species domination.
We therefore need to bring our species morals into line with the
real facts of biological possibility.

To be
specific, we fail to appreciate that we could have been in the
kind of position with respect to another species that apes now
occupy with respect to us; so we protect ourselves from the moral
issues that arise about our actual relation to apes. Or rather, we
acknowledge the contingency of our biological position in odd and
localised ways - as if our unconscious recognises it only too well
but we repress it in the interests of evading its moral
consequences. For our instinctive species-ism wavers when we
consider ourselves on the receiving end of another species'
domination. We allow ourselves to enter into this contingency in
certain special sealed-off imaginative contexts - not in the world
of hard moral and political reality. Significantly, these contexts
typically involve horror and fear and loss of control. For the
most part, nowadays, they take place in the cinema. I am thinking,
of course, of science fiction and horror films. Here alternatives
to our biological supremacy are imaginatively explored. Let me
mention three types of fiction in which we humans assume a
position of species subjugation - or contrive to escape such a
position against considerable odds.

First, of
course, there are the invading aliens from outer space, who come
to destroy or parasitise or enslave the human species - the
body-snatchers, stomach-busters and mind-controllers. Here the
thought is that only space protects our species from the
depredations of more powerful beings, so that space travel is a
potential route to species demotion. Sheer distance is the saving
contingency here. It is just luck that those aliens don't live on
the moon, or else we would be their playthings even now.

Then there
are the vampire stories, in which the theme of using the human
species for food is paramount. A colony of vampires lives off the
human inhabitants of a certain area, drinking their blood, killing
other humans who get in their way. The humans are just a herd for
the vampires. Usually the vampires are depicted as extraordinarily
evil, gloating over the soon-to-be-punctured necks of their
beautiful young victims, but sometimes they are portrayed more
sympathetically, as just doing what nature designed them to do -
slaves to their own biology, as it were. In any case, they are
perceived as a terrifying threat to humans, and there is generally
a good deal of luck involved in fending them off. It was a close
thing that the entire human species wasn't condemned to be
vampire-feed for all eternity. And it is lucky that we, the
viewers, weren't born in Transylvania.

A third
category of human demotion introduces machines, our machines. I
suppose Frankenstein's monster comes into this category, since it
was constructed by a human, albeit from organic parts; but a more
recent example of the genre is the Terminator movies, in
which the international computer network controlling nuclear
weapons achieves self-consciousness one day and, fearful for its
own survival at human hands, begins to wage war on its human
creators, with very nasty consequences. This computer constructs
its own formidable robots ('terminators') whose mission is simply
to kill as many humans as possible, and they will not stop. This,
then, is a case in which our artifacts rise up and exert
domination over us, bringing untold havoc and misery to our
species. And here the contingency is merely the level of
technological advancement of our machines. If we are not careful,
the message goes, our technology will come back to oppress us; so
we had better not rely on luck to prevent this happening in the
future. In fact, if time travel is possible, we should be thinking
about it now, since the future may contain the very terminating
machines made possible by extensions of our present technology.
So, at least, the movies suggest.

Well, this is
all good entertaining fun, but the point I want to make is that
these nightmare fantasies represent, in sublimated form, our
repressed sense of the contingency of our biological supremacy as
a species. They are saying,' You could be in the position
that other species are actually in — that you put them in.'
And, of course, we are supposed to sympathise with ourselves in
these possible fantasy worlds: we applaud the freedom fighters who
seek to liberate us from the selfish domination of other kinds of
being. We certainly don't think that might is right in these
battles between the species. We have to fight them precisely
because they are morally blind to what they are doing to us, or
just outright callous. What I am suggesting now is that we take
seriously the notion that we might have been, or could be, in such
a position, and ask ourselves what moral principles we would want
to see observed if indeed we were the weaker species. That is, we
need a species morality informed by the idea of biological luck.
Equivalently, we need to ask ourselves what rights need to be
granted to species who happen to be thus subservient to us
— apes in the present case. How does it look from their point of
view? If humans had never evolved, then there would have been no
scientific experimentation using apes as subjects, no confinement
of apes in zoos and elsewhere, no systematic killing of apes for
sport. Apes would undoubtedly have been better off without us.
They are cosmically unlucky in the way we would be if any
of the above nightmares become reality. And just as we would fight
to have the evil effects of such bad luck reversed in our case -
using sound moral argument as our justification - so we should
recognise that the bad luck of apes in having humans to contend
with should not be allowed to continue unchecked. In short, we
should stop oppressing them. We should accord them the rights
their intrinsic nature demands, not just acquiesce in the abuses
of power consequent upon our chance biological supremacy. We
might have been the ones in the cages or on the vivisection
tables: and it is a cast-iron certainty we would not have liked it
one bit. Morality, in short, should not be dictated by luck.

Let me end
with an idea for a screenplay. We are a couple of million years
into the future, and time has not been kind to the human species.
Human intelligence reached a plateau in the twenty-first century,
when the physiological constraints of giving birth stopped infant
heads getting any bigger. Unluckily, too, the diseases of the
modern world -physical and psychological — were not vanquished,
leaving humans a generally sickly and neurotic lot. The pollution,
the overeating, the crime, the stress have made humans a weak and
enervated species. However, the apes have enjoyed a steady march
forward. Their frontal lobes have been expanding all the time,
they are fit and robust, and they have long since thrown off their
human shackles. They have all the trappings of civilisation. Now,
in fact, the status quo has been reversed: humans are now
vulnerable to their whims. Some of the more unscrupulous of the
gorillas — the ones with the flashy houses and private jets — have
gone into business selling human specimens for a variety of
purposes, no questions asked. Some go for medical experiments
designed to benefit apes, others to slaughterhouses, the lucky few
become pets, yet others are sold for interspecies prostitution. So
far this is all illegal, done on the black market, and is
officially frowned upon by the apes' government. But it is easy to
arrange, given the vulnerable state of so many humans. The big
problem, for the ape entrepreneurs, is getting the trade in humans
accepted and legalised, so that they don't have to operate on the
wrong side of the law. There is this annoying ape lobby, you see,
that disapproves of subjugating humans in these ways, and, of
course, the humans are less than thrilled about it themselves. The
shady businessapes are working on the corruption of some high
officials to get them to pass a law allowing what is now only done
illegally. The propaganda, thankfully, is a breeze, given what all
apes know about their treatment at the hands of humans for so many
centuries — it is there in the history books. Serves them right,
does it not? It looks like they are going to succeed in
institutionalising their exploitation of humans, unless that brave
coalition of good apes and desperate humans can prevent them . . .

OK, my point
is this. Suppose this story became reality: wouldn't it be better
to be able to say to the apes, who are generally a kind and decent
species, that we stopped exploiting them voluntarily in the last
decade of the twentieth century? We saw the error of our ways, so
why should they repeat our earlier mistakes? We were not simply
forced, by their biological ascendancy and our decline, to grant
them rights in the middle of the 1000th century, say, after a
bloody war; we just did it from moral principle well before we
could be made to. We could thus appeal to their moral sense by
citing our own earlier moral example. We would have an answer to
the more cynical apes who insisted it was just our 'bad luck' that
they have now assumed the more powerful position. I, at least,
would like to think that, if my screenplay comes to pass one day,
our human offspring will have some moral case to make
against their own ruthless exploitation at the hands and jaws of
other species. If we can do it, why can't they?